


Miracles of Science

by themerrygentleman



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Happy birthday Overwatch!, friendship fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 05:49:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10984653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themerrygentleman/pseuds/themerrygentleman
Summary: Everyone has doubts about their path in life from time to time--even jet-powered apes and time travelers. Shortly following the activation of the Overwatch Recall, Tracer helps her old friend Winston work through a bout of second thoughts.





	Miracles of Science

**Author's Note:**

> Happy one-year anniversary to Overwatch! Hard to believe it's already been that long. This game and its fandom have brought me tremendous fun over the past 365 days, and will hopefully continue to do so long into the future! To celebrate, here's a little story about the two heroes who started it all.

After he activates the Overwatch recall, it takes Winston the better part of a week to find a moment to just sit down and relax.

Athena has been chiding him for days about the necessity of regularly observed leisure time, and time and again he’s waved off the AI’s concerns, telling her to remind him again later. He’s been doing the work of ten superintelligent gorillas: reactivating dozens of Watchpoint: Gibraltar’s long-dormant systems, monitoring world news around the clock, and doing his damnedest to make contact with any of the former Overwatch agents now scattered to the four winds. And all the while, he’s been driven by an unspoken conviction that taking even a few minutes’ rest could lead to missing something vital, and from there to total catastrophe.

His gene mods have kept him up and running for a truly remarkable length of time. But finally, everything catches up. His prodigious brain, always humming with new concepts and connections, gradually breaks down into nothing but white noise. It’s not long before he catches himself picking up the same datapad and setting it down over and over, with no memory of why he needed it in the first place. He has to concede that Athena is right: if he doesn’t take a break now, he’s likely to collapse before long.

So he goes back to an old, old routine, one he’s followed whenever he needed time alone to mull things over, ever since the better days when the original strike team was whole and alive. He grabs a jar of peanut butter, makes his way out to a comfortable spot near the Watchpoint’s dormant rocket launch platform, then sits down and watches the sun sink down over the Strait of Gibraltar, turning the water a blinding liquid gold.

In time, the distant rush of the waves, and the echoed cries of the gulls, wear away the tension that’s bound up his whole frame for days on end. He takes in a deep breath of salty air and slowly lets it out. He hadn’t realized how much he needed this.

There’s a distant, echoing roar, and Winston looks up and watches the trail of a hyperjet arc overhead, a pale chalk-white line splitting the indigo sky in two. He cranes his neck back, following the motion of the craft until it’s disappeared beyond the horizon. Finally, nothing is left but the trail, already beginning to fragment and fade away into the blue. Something about it tugs at Winston’s heart in a way he can’t quite put into words. He sighs and reaches for the jar of peanut butter again.

For once, not even the salty sweetness of his favorite snack is enough to keep the melancholy at bay. Winston slumps back against a shipping crate, grumbling fretfully under his breath. Can’t his brain ever stop working, even for a second? Does serenity really have to be so fragile for him, that nothing more than the sound of a jet can send all the old worries clouding back into his head in an instant?

He isn’t given much time to dwell on it. Without warning there’s another loud noise, this one much closer to home: the high-tech _zip_ sound of a chronal accelerator at work. It’s accompanied by a split-second flare of blue light, and just like that, someone else is standing next to him: none other than his old friend Lena “Tracer” Oxton, her spiky hair blown into disarray by the rapid transit and her long scarf blown back over her shoulder.

“Winston!” she cheers, her face lighting up. “Whatcha looking at?”

He gives her a nod of acknowledgement and adjusts his glasses. “Oh, hello. Nothing much, just watching the clouds go by. I take it you’re finally back from your supply run?”

Lena snaps off a mock salute. “Yup! Got everything on your checklist; left the lot of it in the lab for you to go over when you get the chance. Sorry it took so long, incidentally, got a bit distracted along the way.”

“I see.” Winston clears his throat delicately (which, coming from him, still sounds like an approaching thunderstorm). “And this distraction didn’t happen to have red hair and freckles, did it?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Lena informs him, folding her arms and giving him a lofty look through her aviator sunglasses. “As an agent of Overwatch, I know a thing or two about keeping _classified_ intelligence secure.”

Winston chuckles. “Fair enough, I suppose.” He picks up the datapad lying next to him and swipes through a few screens. “And anyway, we’ve earned the right to take it easy for a little while. I’ve just about finished running checks on all our crucial systems, and I’m most of the way through taking inventory of everything that got left in storage here. We should both still keep an eye on news and comms in case of any new developments, but for the moment, I’d say our highest priority is taking a breather.”

“About time,” Lena sighs, then pauses, tilting her head, brow furrowed. “Hang on a moment, though, _Winston_ taking a break of his own free will? Nah, I don’t believe it for a second. Athena put you up to this, didn’t she.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Winston tells her, struggling to keep a straight face. “As an agent of Overwatch…”

“All right, all right, shut up, you got me,” Lena tells him through a fit of giggles. Winston, for his part, manages a genuine smile in response, which isn’t half bad in his present state.

“Still,” Lena says after the laughter has faded away, “watching the clouds go by doesn’t sound so bad, now you mention it. Can’t remember the last time I had a chance to put my feet up.”

Winston gestures to the empty space next to him. “By all means, join me.”

She drops neatly into a sitting position next to him, legs crossed under her. Lena Oxton is a perpetual motion machine, so now as always, she doesn’t exactly sit still—out of the corner of his eye, Winston can see her gently rocking back and forth, as though matching the rhythm of the distant surf. But for several long moments she says nothing, just watching the last embers of the sunset with him—and it says a lot that she can tell this is exactly what he needs right now.

The sun is sinking down behind what’s left of the old launch gantry now, its dusty gold light shimmering through the silhouetted lattice of steel beams. A last gleam catches the lenses of Winston’s glasses, and then it’s gone, leaving a rapidly darkening sky behind.

“Everything all right, big guy?” Lena asks, after a time.

Her voice is considerably softer than usual, but it still jolts Winston out of another reverie. He clears his throat awkwardly. “What? Oh, uh, yes, everything’s fine. Nothing about Overwatch in the news today, and Athena would tell me if there was anything else that…”

It’s getting too dark to discern the fine details of facial expressions, but Winston can hear the frown in Lena’s voice nonetheless. “You _know_ I don’t mean that.”

“Well, what _do_ you mean?” Winston huffs. He’s not sure what she’s driving at, exactly, but somehow he’s just not in the mood to make this any easier for her.

She pauses, considering. “I dunno. You’re quiet.”

“Not _everyone_ feels the need to spend every waking moment talking like you do, Lena,” Winston fires back, regretting the sharpness of it a moment after he’s said it. He starts mentally drafting an apology, just in case Lena’s taken it badly.

But she just waves his comment away, shaking her head. “It’s not that. It’s a different kind of quiet. I can practically _feel_ it radiating off of you. So come on, what’s eating you?”

Winston sighs, all too well aware that there’ll be no putting her off. He lingers over cleaning his glasses for a few more moments, trying to find the words. “Nothing serious, don’t worry,” he finally says. “It’s been an intense week, and just...all of this, going through this old stuff…I don’t know. It’s been bringing back a lot of memories. I just needed to…take a moment.”

Lena hesitates for a moment, then nods.  “Mm. I know what you mean. D’you mind if I stick around for a bit?”

“Oh, no, by all means.” Neither of them says anything for a while after that, and together they watch the first faint stars glimmering into being overhead.

 “It _is_ a bit eerie, isn’t it?” Lena says softly after a while. “Being back here. Like coming home and finding someone’s gone and turned your house into a museum while you were out.”

“It’ll get better,” Winston makes himself say. “Angela and Reinhardt said they’d be here as soon as they could get away, and then after that…”

“Yeah, I know, you’re right,” Lena grumbles. She sighs. “Waiting around for things to _start_ was never really my strong suit, I guess.”

The normally irrepressible Tracer being so quiet and mournful just feels _wrong,_ like someone hitting a discordant note on a piano, and it disturbs Winston far more than his own melancholy had ever managed to. Finally he can’t stand it anymore, and he forces his voice back to something like its usual heartiness. “Hey, you might find this interesting. I was just up at the launch platform. Taking inventory, clearing out all the cobwebs. Would you believe it, everything’s just how we left it. Come on, let me show you what I found.”

“A trip down memory lane? Lead the way, big guy.” And just like that, Lena springs back to her feet, her familiar thousand-watt grin back in place. Under the surface of the expression, though, Winston thinks he can detect something subtler, a hint of quiet gratitude. Apparently he’s not the only one who needed his mind taken off things.

Grateful for an excuse to get out of the increasingly cool breeze, Winston makes his way to the entrance of one of the bulky rectangular compounds that flank the launch platform, built into the ancient stone of the cliffs. He keys in the entry code and starts up the interior stairs, Lena zipping along ahead of him.

By the time he’s arrived in the compound’s cavernous central room, she’s already blinking around its perimeter, poking curiously at all the experiments and equipment she can find. “God, this brings me back. Look, there’s that old examining table where I had to stay for hours on end whenever you lot were monkeying around—“ she catches herself and blanches—“whoops, uh, sorry, no offense meant, _messing_ around with my chronal accelerator.” She sighs, one side of her mouth turning up in half a wistful smile. “I bet I could still count all the little holes in the ceiling tiles; spent long enough staring at ‘em.”

Winston chuckles. “Take a look over here. I actually dug up that deep-sea diving suit prototype I was testing out way back when. Remember that?”

Lena’s face lights up as she takes in the suit hanging on the wall, with its bulky simian proportions and clear glass bubble of a helmet. “The Frogston!”

 “As I recall, I never agreed to that name,” Winston grumbles. “But yes. Did I ever tell you what we were planning to use it for?”

Lena wrinkles her nose, considering. “Oh, gosh, that’s a long time…it was for one of the space missions, wasn’t it? Underwater, but somewhere off-planet.  One of those moons Jupiter and Saturn have all over the place…the one with the ocean under the surface…Ganymede?”

“Europa, actually.” Winston finds he can’t keep a wistful grin off his face. “It would have been the first ever manned Overwatch mission to another world. I still can’t believe I was almost a part of it. We thought we had a real chance of finding extraterrestrial life, somewhere down there in the oceans.”  

“‘They Came from Beyond the Moon!’” Lena intones, her eyes wide as flying saucers, waggling her fingers in an approximation of writhing tentacles.

Winston huffs with laughter. “Nothing quite that dramatic. Microorganisms, maybe. But who knows, really—we never got to find out for sure.” He sighs. “I guess the life closer to home got in the way. We were just wrapping up the final training sessions before…you know…what happened in Geneva.”

Lena gives the bulky material of the Frogston suit an experimental prod with the tip of one finger. “Y’know, I still can’t believe we used to have our own _space program._ Sounds almost impossible now, doesn’t it?”

It does, and Winston’s heart gives a twinge at that thought. But he pushes that aside for now. “Right? I mean, how cool is _that_? We were right out there competing with the big national agencies. Give us another ten years or so and we probably could have set up a Mars base. And then on top of that, we had the Ecopoint network, and all the medical work Angela was doing, and everything else…whatever else happened in the end, we sure showed them we were more than just a bunch of hired guns for busting Omnics.”

The pleasant nostalgia fades as quickly as it had welled up. Winston picks up the helmet of the Frogston suit and studies his warped reflection in the glass, momentarily aping Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull. “That’s what I miss about the old days, more than anything.”

Lena nods. “I know what you mean. But it’s not like we’ve gone all the way back to the dark ages, is it? There’s still plenty of people out there keeping up the good work. Lijiang Spaceflight were all over the news last week for that new rover they just launched…”

“I know, I know.” Winston sets the helmet down and sighs. “But still, it’s not the same.”

Lena puts a hand on his shoulder. “Yeah. It’s not.”

Winston stares at the floor for an interminable moment, tracing the edges of a faded coffee stain spilled by some long-since-forgotten researcher. He’s not sure he can bring himself to voice the thought that’s been echoing around in his head all this time. He’s always hesitated to put it into words, even to himself.

Finally, though, he takes a deep breath, and the words fall out heavily. “It’s times like this, looking at all of this, I don’t know… I wonder.”

“Wonder what?” Lena asks, sounding cautious.

“Whether it’s worth it. All of it,” Winston says. “The Recall, the whole idea of having a second Overwatch…maybe it was a mistake.”

He must have done a better job of hiding his thoughts than he realized, because Lena is blinking at him in genuine shock. “What are you talking about? Winston, come off it, mate! This whole thing was your idea in the first place! If it wasn’t for you—“

“I _know_ about all that,” Winston growls. “It’s just…just look at this place. So many forgotten dreams. Everyone had their own pet project, something they believed in, something they thought had a real shot at making the world a better place. And here it all is now, gathering dust in a corner. Just a bunch of junk.” He swipes an arm across the nearest table, sending the parts of some kind of disassembled engine crashing to the floor.

Lena jumps back, waving her hands in alarm. “Whoa whoa whoa, don’t go all Primal Rage on me now! We’ll get it up and running again…”

To Winston, though, the incandescent, cathartic fury of Primal Rage feels a million miles away. What he’s experiencing now is something far worse, something cold and heavy and bitter. He heaves a sigh. “Will we? Something tells me those days are over—for all the good they ever did in the first place. After the Omnic Crisis was over, what did we ever accomplish that lasted? What was the point?”

Lena just shakes her head. “Come on, Winston, don’t be like that.”

“It’s not _me_ , it’s the way it _is_.” Winston takes off his glasses, takes a long look at his blurry reflection in the lenses. Then he sets them gently down on the now-empty table and hangs his head. He can’t look Lena in the eye right now.

“It’s not any different from what happened on the moon, is it?” he finally says. “D…Doctor Winston and the others. They had their own beautiful dreams. Discovery. Imagination. Seeing beyond the horizon. Making a better world. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Sounds _familiar_. And for a while it all works out great. And then the whole thing gets infected with greed and hate and rage and it all comes crashing to the ground.

“I came to Earth and joined Overwatch and I thought it’d be different, and then it happened all over again. First the Ecopoints and the rocket launches and the Nobel prizes, then the next thing you know, we’re all under investigation for war crimes and Morrison and Reyes are blowing up HQ. The imagination, the wonder, they die away. People stop believing in anything _beyond._ Anything but money in their pocket and ammo in their hands.”

Winston can’t remember the last time he heard Lena stay silent for this long. He still can’t make himself look up. “Look, I’m sorry to unload all of this on you all of a sudden. It’s just…sometimes I can’t see the point in trying to get the whole thing up and running again. I’ve been through this whole story twice already. I don’t know if I’m up for a third round. I already know how it ends.”

Winston puts his head in his hands, clenching his jaw and wishing in vain for the dull, weary ache to subside. Underneath the headache, he can feel the old nightmare replaying itself in his brain, the same one that’s been running on a loop all week. He’s lost in endless maze of metal corridors under flickering electric lights, the acrid tang of smoke and blood in the air, the walls pockmarked with bullet impacts. Sometimes the view out the windows is gray lunar dust and the cold, clear black of space. Sometimes it’s snow drifts and Swiss mountains. Sometimes it’s the strait of Gibraltar shimmering in the summer sun. It doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.

A smack to the side of the head jolts him out of his reverie. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Lena planting her hands back on her hips, glaring at him. “ _Oi!_ That is _more_ than enough of that,” she snaps. “I know you’ve lost a lot. So have I, come to that. But getting stuck in self-pity mode isn’t going to solve a thing. So snap out of it and just _listen_ to me for a second.”

Winston sighs. He really isn’t in the mood to hear a big speech right now, but he knows there’ll be no stopping Lena once she gets rolling. “Go on…”

Lena’s voice softens by a few degrees. “You want to know what good you’ve done that’s lasted? Look at me."

Winston folds his arms, scowling. “You don’t have to patronize”—

Lena just shakes her head. “No, you daft ape. I mean it. _Look_ at me.”

Grudgingly, he does. Lena waves a hand over the chronal accelerator strapped to her chest, making its ever-present blue light flicker for a split second. “Remember this? I was _ripped out of time_ , Winston. When Project Slipstream malfunctioned, that should have been the end of me. And the _only_ reason I am sitting here and talking to you right now”—she taps the side of the accelerator meaningfully—“is this. And that’s because of you. So if you’re gonna tell me you’ve never done anything worthwhile, you’ll forgive me if I disagree a bit.”

An instant surge of guilt floods through Winston. He coughs awkwardly into one fist. “That’s…when I…Lena, I didn’t mean…”

She ignores him and presses ahead. “You ask any physicist, and they’d tell you I shouldn’t even _exist_ anymore. Plenty of ‘em did, back then. But here I am just the same. You saved me, and then you did one better than that. You made me into something one-of-a-kind, turned the biggest nightmare of my life into a new way for me to help people.”

Winston has to admit, he can’t really argue with that. Not quite trusting himself to speak, he just nods.

“And while you’re at it, speaking of one-of-a-kind, take a look in the mirror sometime.” Tracer gestures inarticulately for a moment, clearly trying to find the right words. “For crying out loud, you’re—you’re a _gorilla_ who was born on the _moon_ , and you’re smarter than any human being I’ve ever known, and you survived a revolution and came to Earth and made yourself into a bona fide superhero.”

“I’m familiar with my own backstory, yes,” Winston grumbles—but as reluctant as he is to admit it, something in him is already starting to feel just a little bit lighter.

Tracer throws out her hands in a _there, you see?_ kind of gesture. “Well, then you should know that it’s bloody amazing! The fact that I’m still here—the fact that you’re here at all—that’s something _beyond,_ right there, isn’t it? The two unlikeliest people you could imagine. When it gets right down to it, we’re both about as close to miracles as you can get in this old world. Now, I have no intentions of wasting that miracle while I’ve got it, and I’m betting deep down you don’t either.”

She sinks down to where Winston is slumped on the floor and puts one hand on his shoulder. When she speaks again, he hardly recognizes her voice—it’s more quiet and serious than he’s ever known it. “Listen. I know it’s…hard. All of it. But we’re here. We’re still here, you and me. After everything that’s happened, we still exist. That _matters._ And I still believe in what we’re _really_ fighting for, or I wouldn’t be here. And I know you still believe it too, even if you _are_ a grumpy gorilla about it sometimes.”

Winston blinks rapidly a few times, doing his best not to choke up. Trying to reassemble his composure, he glances away for a moment, his gaze falling on the Overwatch insignia emblazoned on the nearest wall. The familiar black and orange logo doesn’t hurt to look at the way it did just a few moments ago. “You’re right,” Winston finally tells Lena, who’s been waiting patiently by his side.

She shrugs, her usual breezy demeanor back in place. “Usually am.”

Winston manages a chuckle. “Well, don’t get a big head about it. It could seriously throw off your aerodynamics.”

Lena nods, mock-solemn. “Wouldn’t want that, would we.”

Winston gets back up and stretches mightily, then makes for the door. He’s had enough of this warehouse for one day. Just inside the doorway, he turns back to Lena, who’s been following close at his heels. “But listen, seriously…thank you.”

She just nods. “Any time, big guy. You’ve done the same for me a time or two.”

“You have a point there.”

Lena punches him lightly in the arm. “We’re a team, that’s how it works. Miracles of science, you and me. Now let’s get out there and show everyone else what we’re made of.”

Winston glances around him, smelling the sea air. Dusk has well and truly fallen now, and the Watchpoint’s lighting system has turned itself on for the night. “I’ll get back to you on that _after_ my next full sleep cycle, all right? Don’t forget, this is still our day off.”

Lena nods, stifling a yawn herself. “…Yeah, tomorrow. We’ll show them what we’re made of tomorrow.”

Both of them, by unspoken agreement, have started making for the Watchpoint’s lounge area. Winston grins. “Until then, what do you say we revive an old tradition?”

Even in the darkness, he can see Lena’s face light up. “Terrible B-movie marathon night?”

“Got it in one,” Winston tells her. “Go ahead and invite Emily over, and I’ll get the popcorn started.”

“You got it, big guy!” Tracer snaps off a salute, and she’s gone in three blinks of her chronal accelerator, its trail leaving a neon blue zigzag through the gathering night.

Winston looks after her with a smile, then turns and heads back into the Watchpoint, a place that’s slowly starting—by some miracle—to feel a just a little bit less like a graveyard, and maybe just a little bit more like a home.


End file.
